UniFiction Ministry to be abolished?
[Update: The Marmot is giddy about this.]
Had George Orwell lived in modern-day Korea, reality would have mooted his most sardonic fiction. After all, a lying Ministry of Truth is only marginally sillier than a Ministry of Unification whose primary function is keeping the slaves on the other side of the mine fields through the lavish financing of their overseers. Today comes word that president-elect Lee Myung-Bak may put an end to this cruel joke by abolishing the Ministry:
The Unification Ministry has been at the centre of growing criticism that the outgoing government has been too soft on the communist North, pouring aid across the border despite internationally condemned missile and nuclear tests.
Members of President-elect Lee Myung-bak’s team feel it has drifted off course, one adviser said.
“Many officials in the transition team take a negative view of the role and function of the Unification Ministry,” Korea University professor Nam Sung-wook, an adviser to the team, was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency on Thursday. [Reuters, Jon Herskovitz]
Lee, who thinks he’s going to win big in next April’s parliamentary elections, seems to be leaking this idea as a trial balloon just to play it safe. The most eminently sensible idea is to merge UniFiction into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, given the frequency with which the two ministries seemed to represent the positions of two completely different countries (a suspicion that’s not completely unjustified).
The Ministry of Unification has provided the great majority of South Korea’s aid to the North Korean regime during the last decade. Without that aid, Kim Jong Il’s misrule probably wouldn’t have outlasted years of economic decay, famine, and sanctions; on the plus side, however, it certainly managed to keep the wretched refuse and their begging bowls far from the Prada store in Apkujeong.
If you didn’t see foresee the end of the job that gave “Comrade” Chung Dong-Young his historical legacy, such as that is, then you’ve obviously never seen this picture. Not surprisingly, this idea isn’t being welcomed at the Ministry of Unification:
It quoted Unification Ministry officials as saying they fear the North would see the move as reducing it to just an “ordinary” country.
You can see just how little Lee has to work with here.
Also facing the axe, by the way, is the Ministry of Truth the “information agency” that some newspapers accused of heavy-handed efforts to influence their reporting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with governments exercising a degree of message control, of course, but recall that Roh’s senior presidential secretary for press information didn’t always seem much more liberally minded than her counterparts in Pyongyang:
“So long as the Chosun Ilbo remains the most influential newspaper, no reforms of the government can succeed,” she asserted. She also proposed a drive to double the readership of the Hankyoreh, attributing the daily’s lack of space and shoddy editing to the paper’s poor financial start. [Chosun Ilbo]
Still no word on abolishing the Human Rights Commission, or at least orienting it toward promoting the human rights of those Koreans most in need of a few.
Hat tip and thanks to a friend.